


Postscript

by osprey_archer



Series: Bolsheviks [5]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 13:44:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7894873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve looks through the photo album from Bucky's Winter Soldier days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Postscript

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to littlerhymes for betaing this!

A puff of dust rises from the black leather book when Bucky tosses it on the kitchen table. Steve stands at the sink filling the kettle - Bucky usually likes a cup of tea when he gets back from a mission - but he turns away from the water to look at the book. 

“Natasha found it,” Bucky says, in the brusque careless way he has when he’s trying to pass over something important. He takes the overflowing kettle from Steve’s hand and sets the water to heat. “You can look at it. If you want.” 

Which means Steve had better look. 

He picks up the book: slim and light, the leather dry and unpleasantly raspy in his hands. He tries to brush off the dust, but it’s ingrained in the leather. 

There’s a yellowing square of paper stuck to the front, peeling up at the corners to reveal dried brown paste. Steve knows his Cyrillic well enough to sound out the words, although he doesn’t know what most of them mean, and he’s only struggled through a few when his eyes skip down to the page to a phrase he knows. 

Зимний Солдат.

The Winter Soldier. 

Of course. 

Steve finds that he has moved to the couch without meaning to. He sits down, the book on his lap. It feels heavy. He has to steel himself to open the cover. 

The first page is a photo of Bucky, a portrait. Bucky wears a Soviet uniform and smiles for the camera, his hat cocked ever so slightly off regulation angle. 

Steve knows that photos lie. He’s seen pictures of himself, just after the Avengers chased the Chitauri out of New York: newspaper photos where he’s beaming at the empty sky, eating shawarma with a happy tired smile on his face. And he had been happy, in that moment, flush off the victory of saving the planet. 

But he had been miserable beforehand and miserable for weeks and months afterward, grieving for his dead friends and his lost world and the future with Peggy that he now could never have. 

But Steve has heard about Bucky’s early Soviet days, and he doesn’t think this picture is lying. He can imagine - can almost hear, although of course they would have been speaking Russian and in his head it is in English - Grisha scolding the Soldier, exasperated, affectionate. “Straighten your cover, soldier,” he says, and the Soldier, innocent-eyed, rearranges it so it is straighter but not quite right, and Grisha doesn’t notice until he snaps the photo. 

Probably they took another picture; doubtless there was a photo where the Soldier had his hat on straight. But this is the one Grisha chose for his photo album. 

This must have been in evidence, Steve realizes. That’s where Natasha must have found it: in the old KGB files. It must have been there… seventy years. Since Grisha was arrested. 

The sound of Bucky’s spoon clinking in his teacup brings Steve back to the present. He turns the page. 

The photo on the back of the page detaches from the paper, floating down to rest against the next page. The paste has given out. Steve gently moves it back in place and peers at the two photos, black and white, slightly blurry - outdoor photos, not posed like the portrait of the Soldier. 

Neither of these photos on these two pages contain Bucky. He looks at them briefly, parses the names beside them - _M. R. Beck, P. G. Smirnov, R. T. Kravchenko_. Grisha’s handwriting is strong and even, the ink still dark after all these years because there has been no light to fade it. 

Then Steve moves on. He passes many of the pictures swiftly, looking for Bucky. Here’s one with Bucky clowning around on a ruined tank, straddling the turret as if he owns it, cigarette dangling from his mouth. Here’s one with Bucky testing a new rifle, eyes narrowed in concentration. Here’s one with Bucky kissing an old woman’s cheek, and she’s rolling her eyes and laughing, and they could be in Brooklyn and she could be Mrs. Kovitz who owned Bucky’s favorite deli, who used to scold Bucky for loitering and yet give him an extra pickle in the end, because he was so charming. 

Steve turns the page again, and stops. This is Agnessa. 

He can tell it’s her because it is a double portrait, Bucky and Agnessa facing each other; but Bucky is almost an afterthought, his face in shadow, while the sunlight shines on Agnessa’s round cheek so she catches the eye. 

He is surprised, almost disappointed: he had expected somehow a shining vision of beauty, a sort of cross between Peggy Carter and Natasha Romanov. But Agnessa is a very ordinary girl, round-faced, heavy-browed, her hair falling out of a stubby ponytail in a way that looks merely messy rather than artfully disordered. A strand falls in her eyes, and the messiness of it makes him feel a rush of tenderness toward her, like a father toward a daughter-in-law, although he’s not sure why that’s the relationship that occurs to him. Perhaps it is just that she and Bucky both look so very innocent in the photo. 

Although that, he knows, is a photographic lie. Agnessa fought in the Ukraine during the war: she must have seen horrors. 

Steve turns to the next page. There’s a blister on the paper, as if a tear had fallen, and Steve puts a finger over it. It’s still damp. Steve thinks of Bucky looking at Agnessa and turning the page so it won’t be her photo ruined - 

“Don’t be sentimental.”

Bucky’s voice is rough. He is leaning over the back of the couch, just inches away, and Steve had been so absorbed he hadn’t noticed. 

“This is your team?” Steve asks, although he already knows. 

Bucky nods. “There aren’t many more pictures,” he says. His voice is rough, almost angry.

“Come sit here,” Steve says, and Bucky comes around the couch and plops down next to him. His hands hang loosely in his lap. He’s staring straight ahead, scowling, though Steve thinks he can probably see the photos through his peripheral vision. 

Another photo of the old woman, blowing a smoke ring. A young man scowling up at the camera, an open book clutched to his chest as if to hide the contents. A group shot of half a dozen people gathered around a picnic, the photo so gray and grainy that it is hard to parse the faces. 

The last is a double portrait: Bucky beaming at the camera, his right arm flung around the shoulders of a middle-aged man who is looking at him with faint surprise.

And that’s it. Steve flips through a few more pages to be sure, but there are no more pictures. The album is less than half full.

Steve lets the album fall open to the final photo again. He looks at Bucky smiling in the picture, and glances over at Bucky beside him. Bucky is nearly doubled over. His hair is falling out of its ponytail into his face, and it strikes Steve how like Agnessa’s hairstyle that is. He wonders if that’s on purpose. 

“Is this Grisha?” Steve asks, gesturing at the man in the photograph.

Bucky nods.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, which seems inadequate; but Bucky nods again. He’s shielding his face with his hand. 

“Do you want to tell me about them?” Steve asks.

“No,” Bucky says, and suddenly he’s all choked up. He walks to the window, looking out of it and then twisting away. He folds his arms over his stomach, his body clenching up around them. He covers his face with one hand. 

Steve sets the album aside on the coffee table. He makes as if to go to Bucky, hesitates, settles again on the edge of the couch. Bucky rubs his hand over his face, tilts his head back, takes a deep breath. Steve can see his throat bob as he swallows. 

“I don’t want to talk about them,” Bucky says. “You wouldn’t understand, anyway.” 

That hurts. But Steve nods. 

Bucky is silent a while longer. He has his chin propped on his hand, his head turned to the side. The bright window outlines his profile. Steve is struck by the utterly inappropriate urge to sketch him. 

“I wish I could talk to him again,” Bucky says. His voice is so quiet and clogged it’s hard to understand.

“Grisha?”

Bucky nods. He rubs his hand across his face, although as far as Steve can see he’s not crying.

“What would you say?” Steve asks.

“Oh,” says Bucky, and he makes a sound that is barely recognizable as a laugh. “He was so worried about me,” he says. “He was afraid I wouldn’t be all right after he died. I would tell him - I wish I could tell him I’m all right.” 

Steve’s eyes smart unexpectedly. He takes up the album again, toys with the blank empty pages. He wants to say, _I'm sure he knows_ ; but he knows Bucky doesn't believe in an afterlife. 

"I wish I could have known him," Steve says instead.

And it must have been a good thing to say, because Bucky’s eyes fill with tears. He blinks rapidly, but they fall anyway. “Do you want me to tell you about him?” he asks, choked, wistful, as if Steve hadn’t asked for exactly that only minutes before. 

“Of course,” Steve says. “Tell me about all of them.” 

Bucky doesn’t actually tell him much that day. He gets upset, and they drink tea with jam and go for a walk, and when they get back Bucky puts the album away for another day. 

But their faces hang before Steve in the night, when he is trying to sleep. Grisha and Marusya, Petya and Roman; and Agnessa, with her hair falling into her eyes.


End file.
